Are you a Trust Enabler?

Although the term "Trust Enabler" my be foreign to you, chances are good that unknowingly you are already a Trust Enabler.  In simplest terms, if you aspire to attaining higher levels of confidence in transactions you are a Trust Enabler by definition, because you satisfy the first of six criteria for a Trust Enabler, namely having the Motivation to attain and maintain higher levels of trust and confidence.

Moreover, whether you are a risk taker or risk avoider you can make an important contribution to creating conditions that either establish or ensure trust, since enabling trust has two overriding objectives: 1. to create trust; and 2. protect from a loss or insufficiency of trust.

There are only two ways you can contribute to establishing trust: 1. as an Authoritative Source - by asserting your subjective opinion to a relying party; and 2. as an Experiential Source - by asserting your unbiased, objective observations.  Both methods contribute to establishing trust in unique ways.  Authoritative Sources generally help to establish fast trust to seriously consider engaging in the transaction, while Authoritative Sources help to establish high trust required to initiate the transaction.  If you are in marketing or an expert witness in a trial, you are acting as an Authoritative Source of trust by asserting your opinion about your brand value to your customer or your subject matter expertise.  If you are in sales and customer service or an eye witness in a trial, you are acting as an Experiential Source of trust for the customer or trial judge/jury.  There are many ways in which you can contribute to establishing trust as an Authoritative or Experiential Source of Trust under different circumstances.

There are also only two ways you can contribute to ensuring trust: 1. by having Motivations that are aligned with the person relying on you; and 2. by having the Ability to deliver the value expected by the person relying on you.  Both methods contribute to ensuring (protecting from a loss or deficiency of) trust.  Motivation serves to ensure trust over a longer period of time by making your future decisions predictable.  Your ability ensures trust by making it likely that you will consistently deliver the value that the person relying on you expects from each transaction.  If you are a regulator or sit on a board of directors your job is to define the "rules of the game" that motivate (influence) participants to make predictable decisions.  If you are in management or operations, you use your intellectual capacity, knowledge, skills, behaviour, processes, controls and supporting tools and technologies - in other words your abilities - to deliver expected value with each transaction.

You are also a Trust Enabler if you help to address the trust concerns of people who, even having the above-mentioned resources for establishing and ensuring trust still lack sufficient confidence to engage in a transaction.  You can do this by empowering relying parties to select additional preferred authoritative and/or experiential sources of trust so they can establish even higher levels of trust.  The same is true if you provide means to transfer risks away from relying parties in order to protect them if they have been unable to attain the levels of trust they need, or from events that might erode their trust in the future.  For example, if you facilitate elections/voting or consumer feedback (think of eBay or even Gather.com) you are empowering relying parties to choose their preferred sources of trust and thereby establish higher levels of trust.  Also, if you provide insurance or guarantees then you help relying parties to alleviate their concerns of not having sufficient trust or that their trust might be broken in the future.

For each of the six broad categories that define Trust Enablers there are many dozens of situation-specific ways in which you might contribute to creating conditions for trust.  This article only mentions a couple of typical examples.   For example, people like me (http://trustenablement.com/ and http://trustenablement.gather.com/), Stephen M. R. Covey (http://speedoftrust.gather.com/ and http://speedoftrust.com/), David Maister (http://davidmaister.com/books.ta) and Charles Green (http://www.trustedadvisor.com/about/), as well as others, educate by writing about how to enhance trust.  We are Trust Enablers because people rely on us to be their authoritative sources of trust on the subject of trust.

For one perspective about how different approaches to trust are related and hence how we all make valid contributions as Trust Enablers check out a presentation I recently delivered to the legal community, available at http://trustenablement.com/local/Building_Trust_in_a_Law_Firm.pdf.

Now it's your turn.  Join the Trust Enablers Group and tell us about how you are helping to create conditions for trust.  What makes you a Trust Enabler?